This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
The common data center model has gone through many variations since its origins in mainframe computing. From distributed computers to the client/server model, the utilization of virtualized servers, grid consolidation, and most recently the trend toward utility or “cloud” computing, the demands on data centers are always changing and evolving, and the pace of that evolution is increasing as well.
Modern data centers are undergoing a broad transformation, which encompasses technical innovation, operational improvement, new design principles, changes in the data center supply chain, and changes to the relationship between IT and business. Thus, modern data centers are forming increasingly complex environments with many variables that must be taken into account when considering methods to optimize their efficiency. Along with this transformation comes the issue of energy efficiency and resource management, which will be vital to the success and long-term sustainment of these modern data centers. The ability to maximize efficiency depends upon being able to collect data from all the different components associated with the data center (i.e., IT and infrastructure), and to present the information in a useful way to the system administrators which enables them to make changes when necessary. In particular, with the growing capability of various types of sensors (e.g., air flow, voltage, temperature, humidity) that may be deployed in a data center environment, and the ability to obtain many thousands of real time data points from the outputs of such sensors, the need to analyze and summarize the large number of obtained data points is growing in importance. A challenge, however, has been how to collect and analyze the large number of data points obtained from the various and wide ranging types of sensors used in a data center in a manner that significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be provided to the user. Simply providing every data point obtained from a sensor over a network to the user, or an application being used by the user, could quickly use a good portion of the available bandwidth of a network. This is especially so in a large, modern day data center where many thousands of data points are being obtained from hundreds or more sensors every second.